New Kickstarter Rocki Rocks Your Digital Audio World, Funds in a Day

Most people nowadays have most of their music on their smartphones and one of the biggest obstacles for people that have ‘dumb’ speakers is getting the music from their smartphone to those speakers. However, in most cases you are forced to connect your phone directly to the speakers via a male to male 3.5mm jack. This solution will work, but it usually means that you have to walk over to the sound system to control the audio.

ROCKI looks to solve this problem by freeing your phone and enabling you to stream your music from your phone to the sound system or speaker using the ROCKI device and application in conjunction with your home router. All you need for ROCKI to work is an Android or iOS smartphone, a ROCKI device and a sound system with a 3.5mm input jack which should be about 99.99% of speakers/sound systems. One of the great things about the ROCKI system is that it isn’t limited to just one ROCKI device, you could theoretically have one ROCKI device for every single room in your home and control what music gets played where and stream it from your phone to whichever room you are in, or aren’t in (if you want to annoy someone, perhaps?).

As you can tell, the ROCKI isn’t necessarily cumbersome or oversized but some may argue that it is a bit oddly shaped. I personally think that it kind of looks like a bar of soap once you overlook the obvious crystal-like shape. Also, it will not only be available in the seafoam green color that they have it shown above, it will also be available in Paint It Black, Submarine Yellow, Hot Chilli Peppers Red, Pink Punk Pink, and Deep Purple (seen above).

You can also go ‘wireless’ with the ROCKI because it has a 900 mAh battery inside that you can charge before using so that you don’t have to find a power source for the ROCKI. Although, to be fair, the ROCKI should have a power source somewhere near by if you’re using a set of speakers. But it is still a good thing that they thought of this when building the ROCKI for the few situations where you might want to take it with you somewhere. And the fact that it charges via MicroUSB is awesome because you can use a standard phone charger to charge it.

In terms of file formats, they state that ROCKI will support MP3, FLAC, WAV, AIFF which should pretty much cover 99% of what people are playing on their phones and enable a pretty high level of quality for those people that only use FLAC files. Sure, there are a few other lossless formats not listed, but FLAC support is enough to keep me happy.

The ROCKI Kickstarter went live yesterday and already got funded at their $50,000 goal in the first day. Which means that Nick Yap, the CEO of ROCKI is now 2 for 2 with his Kickstarter Projects getting fully funded in their first day. His first was the already pretty well known Omate TrueSmart for which he was was the co-founder with Laurent Le Pen. That Kickstarter hit over $1,000,000 and was selling for $179 a pop and have already shipped to some of their backers. I suspect that the ROCKI could actually surpass this goal if they can get people excited enough about ROCKI. This is because a ROCKI can be had for $45 (early bird) and $50 Standard. You can also get three ROCKI devices for $135, which is a savings of $5 per ROCKI at the standard price. Personally, I would recommend getting in on the three ROCKI deal because that would most likely result in the best audio experience, that is, if you have three different speakers in three different rooms with WiFi coverage.